Measure that amends Florida’s compensation law for the wrongfully incarcerated passes Senate

 By Mitch Perry

A bill that would make it much easier for individuals wrongfully incarcerated to receive compensation has cleared the Florida Senate, and needs just one final vote in the House before going to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk.

The measure sponsored by Northeast Florida Republican Sen. Jennifer Bradley (SB 130) makes changes to a 2008 state law that was designed to provide financial compensation for individuals wrongfully convicted of a crimes.

That legislation called for eligible exonerees to receive $50,000 for each year they were wrongfully incarcerated, capped at $2 million. However, since its passage, only five exonerees have actually received such compensation, due to a “clean hands” provision that bans people who have had earlier, unrelated felonies from filing compensation claims — the only such restriction of its type in the country.

Bradley’s bill would remove the clean-hands provision. It also would extend the filing deadline for those who have been exonerated from 90 days to two years, and allow a wrongfully incarcerated person both to bring a civil lawsuit and file for compensation under the 2008 law.

However, a claimant would have to repay the state if he or she receives monetary awards both under the 2008 law and through a civil lawsuit.

Eighteen exonerees have been denied compensation because of the clean-hands provision — “totally, 300 plus years of lost liberty,” Bradley told her colleagues on Thursday.

Since 1989, 90 people in Florida have been exonerated or released from incarceration as a result of post-conviction DNA testing, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

“Each of us has an incredible honor to represent our constituents, and part of that privilege of being able to come up here and represent our constituents is the duty that comes with that to be able to right wrongs,” Bradley said. “To be able to stand up for the people of the state of Florida who have been wronged, and this is that bill.”

Bradley thanked to two former state senators who worked on the bill nearly a decade ago — GOP Sen. Rob Bradley, her husband, and Tampa Democrat Arthenia Joyner.

“Sometimes the wheels of justice roll slowly, but nevertheless they arrive at a destination of justice,” said Tampa Bay area Democratic Sen. Darryl Rouson. “This bill speaks of that to those 18 who have been denied.”

The measure’s companion in the House (HB 59), filed by Tampa Bay Republican Traci Koster, passed unanimously in its third and final committee stop on Wednesday and will soon go to the full House for a vote.

This article originally appeared in Florida Phoenix on March 27th, 2025

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Basic Reforms to New York’s Legal Code Are At Risk as Democrats Lurch Rightward

 By Schuyler Mitchell

A push to claw back a process-oriented change in New York’s criminal legal code shows just how readily Democrats will capitulate to carceral demands in 2025.

After years of advocacy, New York lawmakers passed a suite of criminal legal system reforms in 2019. The hard-won changes included the elimination of cash bail for most misdemeanor and non-violent felony charges and an overhaul of the state’s discovery laws, which govern how parties share evidence before a trial. Before the reforms, the state was considered among the worst in the country for defendants’ pretrial access to information. The rules were often likened to a “blindfold” because they allowed prosecutors to withhold basic evidence from the defense team up until the night before a trial — or indefinitely.

But only about 2 percent of criminal cases even make it to the trial stage; most are settled through plea bargains. New York’s blindfold discovery process meant that, in practice, people accused of crimes were sometimes forced to negotiate guilty pleas without even knowing all of the evidence against them.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a “speedy trial,” and under New York state law, prosecutors are supposed to be prepared to go to trial within 90 days for misdemeanors and six months for most felonies. But the old discovery process created a major loophole; prosecutors could claim they were ready for trial, thus stopping the countdown, even if they hadn’t done due diligence on discovery. This could drag out proceedings over many months, with judges allotting more and more time for prosecutors to provide the legally required pretrial evidence. Prosecutorial delays meant that people accused of crimes would languish in jail cells while awaiting their day in court; in one shocking case, Kalief Browder, a teenager from the Bronx, spent three years on Rikers Island despite not having been convicted of a crime. In 2015, two years after he was finally released, he committed suicide.

The 2019 reforms aimed to resolve these issues by requiring prosecutors to do their due diligence to obtain all evidence and setting forth a strict timeline for disclosing it. Now, if the prosecution fails to comply with discovery law requirements, judges are required to dismiss the case or impose sanctions.

Does this sound like a policy proposal conjured up by the far left? Hardly. This was not a rewriting of the criminal legal code as we know it, but rather modest reforms aimed at safeguarding people’s right to a fair and speedy trial in a state known for disregarding such rights. New York’s discovery laws had not been substantially updated since 1979, and more than a dozen past reform attempts had failed before the new law came into being, thanks to strong opposition from the state district attorneys association.

But just as New York’s 2019 cash bail reforms were rolled back, the state’s updated discovery law is now on the chopping block. Gov. Kathy Hochul has signaled her support for a prosecutor-backed push to gut the reforms as part of the state’s massive annual budget bill. Prosecutors claim, without evidence, that the new law is making it too hard to do their jobs and undermining public safety in the process.

The rhetoric is all too familiar. For years, Republicans have largely succeeded at sowing fear about crime running rampant in U.S. cities, and Democrats like Hochul have been all too happy to echo this false framing. After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 propelled the movement for Black lives to new prominence, some cities pledgedto cut police budgets and reinvest in community programs. GOP politicians frequently claim that the “defund the police” rallying cry has led to a national spike in crime. But analyses have shown that defunding the police, not to mention more transformative changes, hardly happened in practice. From the 2019 to 2022 fiscal years, 20 of the 25 largest cities in the U.S. — most helmed by Democratic leaders — actually saw their police budgets increase. And states that enacted more progressive policies in recent years have already begun to roll them back, sometimes replacing them with “tough-on-crime” policies. As the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute, has noted, after New York lawmakers eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and low-level felonies in 2019, “Politicized concerns about rising crime during the Covid-19 pandemic drove lawmakers to pass three rounds of revisions to the law.” The changes included new exceptions that allow judges to set bail in more cases.

The battle over the fate of New York’s discovery reforms follows in these footsteps. Hochul claims that easing pretrial evidence requirements would help “streamline” the 2019 discovery law, as prosecutors claim it has led their cases to get dismissed on minor technicalities. But the publicly available data complicates these claims. While case dismissals have risen in New York City since 2019, that trend hasn’t played out in counties around the state, which one might expect to see from a statewide reform.

Scrutinize, an independent group focused on data analysis and judicial transparency, reviewed nearly 300 unpublished judicial decisions from cases dismissed for violations under the new discovery law. “These decisions reveal that judges are dismissing cases because prosecutors regularly fail to meet basic evidentiary obligations, sometimes ignoring discovery requests for months or choosing to withhold evidence,” the report found. “They are not dismissed due to trivial errors or defense tactics.”

A survey of judges conducted by the state’s Office of Court Administration found that, in cases of discovery violations, judges most often gave the prosecution more time to turn over the evidence, rather than dismiss the case outright. New York City judges often differed from judges in other parts of the state in their assessment of the discovery reforms: 51 percent of city judges reported a great increase in case dismissals since the law passed, but only 18 percent of judges from other parts of the state said the same. (Prosecutors outside of New York City, notably, do not have to wrangle with the infamously noncompliant NYPD in order to obtain required evidence.)

It may feel a bit silly to wrangle over technicalities in state law at a time of such heightened criminalization, as Donald Trump spearheads a draconian crackdown on dissent and immigration. But it is important to see Hochul’s proposal to gut discovery reform for what it is — part of the reactionary lurch to the right playing out across the country, which threatens the fundamental rights of anyone who could interact with the legal system. It is dangerous for Democrats to tarry within the false limits laid out for them by the GOP’s “tough-on-crime” talking points. And as elected officials seek to undermine recent criminal legal system reforms, those of us must not lose sight of the ultimate horizon: abolition.

This article originally appeared in TruthOut on March 27th, 2025

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Here Are the Texted War Plans That Hegseth Said 'Nobody Was Texting' on Signal

 By Jon Queally

In response to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claiming on live television earlier this week that "nobody was texting war plans," The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday morning published the "war plans" that were, in fact, shared on the private sector messaging app Signal by top members of President Donald Trump's national security team, including Hegseth and national security advisor Mike Waltz.

It was The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg who on Monday published a bombshell report about how he was, seemingly "inadvertently," added to the Signal group chat by Waltz, a conversation that, in addition to Hegseth, also included director of national security Tulsi Gabbard, CIA director John Ratliffe, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Vice President JD Vance, and others.

In the new piece published, Goldberg said that public denials by these top officials since the original reporting presented the magazine "with a dilemma" about what to do with information the editorial team had initial withheld, citing national security concerns.

"These are strike plans. There must be a broad investigation of how compromised our national security is because of their shocking incompetence." — Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas)

Though its editorial decision to withhold information was criticized by some journalists who believe the public has a right to know such details—including reporter Ken Klippenstein who accused the magazine of falling prey to "media paternalism" by not initally releasing the full contents of the chat—Goldberg explained The Atlantic's decision this way:

we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

However—citing Hegseth's on-air denial Monday, a statement by Trump that nothing in the chat was "classified," as well as testimony before a committee in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by Gabbard and Ratliffe, both of whom said under oath that classified information was not shared—Goldberg said the magazine's assessment changed.

"We believe," writes Goldberg in the latest piece, "that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared."

Given that the nation's highest-level national security officials, up to and including the President of the United States, have said the material is not classified, the magazine acknowledged—and since the attack plans were for an operation already carried out against Houthis targets in Yemen—it would be strange if The Atlantic still felt not at liberty to publish them.

After reaching out to various agencies in advance of its decision to publish, Goldberg reports that the White House still objected to the release of the exchange, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt claiming that even though "there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat," the administration holds that what was said on the unsecured, third-party communication app was "intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed."

What follows are screenshots of the detailed war plans discussed on the Signal group chat by Trump's top officials, as reported by The Atlantic:

After this portion, Goldberg notes: "If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic."

More details:

And then these paragraphs:

While The Atlantic's new reporting on Thursday sits behind a paywall, reaction to it was immediate and widespread.

"Hegseth repeatedly lied to the American people and should be fired—along with all the others in the chat," said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) in response to Goldberg's latest revelations. "These are strike plans. There must be a broad investigation of how compromised our national security is because of their shocking incompetence."

On Wednesday, two Democratic House members—Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs—launched a congressional probe into whether or not war plans were discussed in the group chat and called on every official involved to preserve all related documents and communications.

"This incident raises grave concerns about the misuse of unsecured communication platforms for classified discussions and the potential that American military and intelligence professionals may have been compromised by the reckless dissemination of such classified material,” Connolly and Frost wrote in a letter addressed to all the officials involved.

Given their testimony before the Senate on Tuesday, Ratliffe and Gabbard may come under specific scrutiny by members of that committee and other lawmakers.

"A reminder that various administration officials lied under oath in the Senate yesterday," said former Democratic congressman Mondaire Jones, "which is a crime punishable by imprisonment."

Photo credit: Japanexpertise

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams on March 26th, 2025

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“I will wear my persona non grata as a badge of dignity”, said South African ambassador expelled by the US

 By Pavin Kulkarni

“We must enter into trade negotiations with the USA because our economy and our people need them. But we must never trade our sovereignty, lest we be told that China and Cuba cannot be our friends,” said veteran diplomat Ebrahim Rasool on his return to South Africa.

Cheering crowds thronged outside the Cape Town International Airport on Sunday, March 23, to welcome the South African ambassador expelled from the US after being subjected to repeated attacks for his stance in solidarity with Palestine.  “Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America,” US State Secretary Marco Rubio accused in a X post on March 15.

“We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON-GRATA,” Rubio added, sharing the alt-right Breitbart News report on the academic observations Rasool had made on the white supremacist character of the “MAGA movement” in a webinar hosted by a South African think tank.

“We will welcome him and say we agree, there is nothing wrong with what he said,” insisted Western Cape Secretary of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), Malvern de Bruyn, who was present at his popular reception. Alongside was also the regional leadership of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

A “badge of dignity”

South African police jostled with the crowd to make way for Rasool, who addressed them on a megaphone saying that a “declaration of persona non grata is meant to humiliate you,” but returning “to crowds like this… I will wear my persona non grata as a badge of dignity.”

His expulsion – just months after his appointment as South Africa’s US ambassador was announced in November – marked a historic low in the relations between the two countries, already souring under the previous Joe Biden-led US administration.

Escalating US hostility toward South Africa

US hostility began to escalate after South Africa, like much of the Global South, maintained a non-aligned posture on the war in Ukraine. This intensified after South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024, amid its US-funded genocide in Gaza.

“In contrast to its stated stance of nonalignment, the South African Government has a history of siding with malign actors, including Hamas, a US designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and a proxy of the Iranian regime, and continues to pursue closer ties with the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’) and the Russian Federation,”complained the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act, introduced in the US House of Representatives last February.

After Donald Trump assumed the presidency earlier this year, the US has turned increasingly aggressive toward South Africa. Describing its act of taking Israel to the world’s highest court for genocide as an “aggressive” position toward the US, Trump halted all aid and assistance this February.

While restricting US entry to actual refugees, Trump went on to offer “resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program” for South Africa’s European colonial settlers, known as the Afrikaners.

Through colonialism and apartheid, these settlers seized most of South Africa’s land through violence. Over three decades after the defeat of apartheid, this white minority who make up just over 7% of the country’s population still owns 72% of all its farmlands, as a result of its failed land reforms.

In “a symbolic gesture” toward correcting this, the South African government enacted the Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 this January, broadening the scope of the already-existing state powers to expropriate land.

Deeming this a “racially discriminatory property confiscation”, Trump’s executive order last month stated that the US “shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”

The role reversal: Blacks oppress the whites

This description echoed the conspiracy theory championed by AfriForum, a South African alt-right, white supremacist lobby group that has long been peddling the narrative of a “white genocide” – not a genocide by the white settlers against the colonized natives, but of them.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a beneficiary and a product of Apartheid South Africa who was amplifying this narrative on X, went on to become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump administration, albeit unelected.

Appointed as South Africa’s ambassador in the aftermath of Trump’s electoral victory, veteran diplomat Rasool was reportedly denied meetings with the Trump administration’s officials from the start.

“After weeks of sustained assaults on my character and reputation – being called a terrorist, jihadist, Islamist, anti-Semite – it is good to be here at home… where we see the human in each other… even inviting those who despised us, dispossessed us, and discriminated against us, into the fold of human rights,” he told his supporters outside Cape Town airport.

“Such a warm welcome,” he added, “would have been better on returning in three to four years having successfully… destroyed the clear and obvious lie of Afrikaner oppression… and white qualification for refugee status in the USA.”

Diverging positions on US relations

Contrasting his defiant posture – cheered by the rank and file of the ruling party and its allies on the left and in the trade union movement – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, however, appeared anxious, urging restraint ahead of Rasool’s arrival.

His spokesperson Vincent Magwenya explained on March 20 that Ramaphosa “is not asking” his supporters to call off the gathering for his welcome, but only to “be considerate about what is at stake with regards to the country’s economy with respect to doing our level best to retain that strategic partnership with the US.”

Rasool also reiterated that “our relationship with the USA is critically important and so we must continue to pursue dialogue and engagement”. However, he set out some “bottom lines” in his speech.

“We can negotiate a lot, but we cannot negotiate away our case against genocide in the ICJ,” he said. “Withdrawing from the International Court of Justice is not an option until Palestine is free and Israel is accountable.”

Sovereignty and BRICS relationships are as important as trade relations with US

Acknowledging the “value [of] our trade with the USA,” he added, nevertheless, that it should not be salvaged at the cost of South Africa’s relations with fellow BRICS members and loss of its non-aligned posture, which will leave it with an “unpredictable” US as its only ally.

“We must enter into trade negotiations with the USA because our economy and our people need them. But we must never trade our sovereignty, lest we be told that China and Cuba cannot be our friends. Our friends are the mighty in the G20. But they are also the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the occupied, whether in Sudan or whether in Palestine.”

This article originally appeared in People's Dispatch on March 25th, 2025

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Trump’s school choice push adds to momentum in statehouses

 By Robbie Sequeira

Federal moves might provide additional money for universal vouchers and scholarships.

More than a dozen states in the past two years have launched or expanded programs that allow families to use taxpayer dollars to send their students to private schools. Now, President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress want to supercharge those efforts.

Trump in January issued an executive order directing several federal agencies to allow states, tribes and military families to tap into federal money for so-called school choice opportunities. Those can come in the form of education savings accounts, voucher programs, tax credits or scholarships. Trump’s order also aims to expand access to public charter schools, which are free from some of the rules that apply to traditional public schools.

Meanwhile in Congress, 24 Republican senators have signed on to legislation that would provide $10 billion in annual tax credits to individuals and corporations who make charitable contributions to organizations that provide private-school scholarships. A Nebraska Republican introduced a companion measure in the House.

Already this year, Idaho, Tennessee and Wyoming have approved school choice programs, and bills are advancing in Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas. A bill in Mississippi died before advancing. Most of the measures still in play would open programs to all families regardless of income, though some states would cap the total amount of money available.

Supporters of school choice say it gives parents control of their kids’ education — and an escape hatch if they are dissatisfied with their local public school. Many conservatives, religious institutions and private schools are in favor of school choice, along with some people of color who live in districts with underperforming public schools.

“Every child is different. They learn in different environments. There are just so many factors, that I believe that parents should be the ones that make the decision on where their child is going to do the best and have the most success,” said Indiana Republican state Sen. Linda Rogers. A former educator, Rogers has sponsored a bill in her state that would provide additional money to charter schools, which are considered to be a form of school choice.

Opponents, including teachers unions, public school professionals and many rural lawmakers of both parties, say such measures undermine traditional public schools by shifting money away from them.

“When we start to take from public schools, we’re hurting our kids, our lower-income kids. They will not prosper from this legislation,” Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Ronnie Glynn said during the floor debate on a far-reaching voucher bill in his state.

Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said vouchers are a budget-buster for states.

“Vouchers don’t shift costs — they add costs,” Cowen said in a phone interview. “Most voucher recipients were already in private schools, meaning states are paying for education they previously didn’t have to fund.”

The switch to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave parents a front-row seat to watch what their children were — or were not — learning in their classes, contributed to the recent school choice momentum. So did parent frustration over prolonged public school closures.

I believe that parents should be the ones that make the decision on where their child is going to do the best and have the most success.

– Indiana Republican state Sen. Linda Rogers

“Parents got a good look into sort of what was happening in schools,” said Bella DiMarco, a senior K-12 education policy analyst at FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University. “There was a lot of talk during the pandemic around school choice … of what public schools aren’t doing for their kids.”

The first modern school voucher program, created in Milwaukee in 1990, was a bipartisan effort to help lower-income families afford private schools. In recent years, more states have moved from school choice programs focused on certain groups, such as low-income students or students with disabilities, to universal programs open to students of all backgrounds.

“Historically, the programs were always sort of targeted to students in need,” DiMarco said. “But in the last couple of years, the new push has been for these universal programs.”

Currently, more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., have at least one school choice program. More than a dozen states now offer universal or near-universal access, allowing K–12 students to participate in school choice regardless of income.

EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice, estimates that 1.2 million students are attending private schools this school year with the help of public tax credits, scholarships or vouchers.

Different strategies

States that enacted school choice programs this year have pursued different strategies.

The program Idaho enacted last month, for example, will provide an annual tax credit of $5,000 per child ($7,500 for students with disabilities) to help cover private education expenses.

Most voucher recipients were already in private schools, meaning states are paying for education they previously didn’t have to fund.

– Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University

Tennessee’s new program will provide 20,000 scholarships of roughly $7,000 each. During its first year, half of the Tennessee scholarships will be reserved for households earning less than $173,000 for a family of four, but that restriction will be removed in subsequent years.

About 65% of the Tennessee vouchers are expected to be awarded to students who already attend private schools, according to a legislative analysis.

Critics say the cost of the program will grow quickly, creating a hole in the state’s budget. Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who pushed hard for the proposal, suggested that Trump’s executive order might provide additional resources. Lee told reporters he hasn’t yet analyzed the order, “but I think there’s opportunity there.”

“The president wants to support states like ours who are advocating for school choice,” Lee said in a news conference after lawmakers approved the measure. Lee was at the White House on Thursday when Trump signed an order calling for the U.S. Department of Education to be dismantled.

Texas lawmakers also are actively debating a voucher program, a longtime priority for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who worked to defeat resistant rural Republicans in last year’s state legislative elections and who also attended the White House event. The Senate passed a bill that would provide $10,000 per student ($11,500 for students with disabilities) annually through education savings accounts. A similar House proposal is under review.

Kansas is considering a universal refundable tax credit — $8,000 per child for accredited private school tuition and $4,000 for non-accredited private schools. The program starts with a $125 million cap, increasing annually if participation hits certain thresholds.

Ballot box defeats

School choice opponents question the wisdom of sending taxpayer dollars to schools that may lack certified teachers, follow nonstandardized curricula or discriminate in admissions. Many private schools have testing standards, maintain religious requirements or exclude LGBTQ+ students or those with certain disabilities, for example.

In some Republican-led states that have expanded school choice, Democrats have filed bills to increase oversight and place restrictions on these programs. A bill in Tennessee would require background checks for teachers at private schools that receive voucher money. And an Iowa bill would require that property tax statements include information on how much money education savings accounts subtracted from local public schools.

As voucher programs have grown, they have attracted greater scrutiny.

ProPublica, an investigative journalism outlet, last year found that Arizona’s universal voucher program has mostly benefited wealthier families. Some Arizona parents have tried to use voucher money to pay for dune buggies and expensive Lego sets, according to press reports.

Critics also note that despite recent legislative successes, school ballot initiatives fared poorly at the ballot box last fall.

Voters in Colorado rejected a measure that sought to enshrine school choice rights in the state constitution.

In Nebraska, voters partially repealed a state-funded private school scholarship program.

And in Kentucky, voters overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the use of public money to support private schools, with 65% of voters — and a majority in every county — opposed.

“There’s a handful of these billionaires that have been pushing vouchers for 30 years,” said Cowen, the Michigan State University professor. “The school choice movement is not necessarily driven by public demand, but rather by wealthy donors and political maneuvering.”